Noel Malcolm enjoys a rich – but occasionally overripe – history
of the Habsburgs.

What does the phrase “Austria-Hungary” conjure up in your mind? If you are a reader of history books, your first answer may be: the blundering, intolerant superpower that helped drag Europe into the First World War, thereby ensuring its own destruction.

If you are a reader of novels, you may have a slightly more benign view of the Austro-Hungarian world – and a better idea of why it could not last. From works such as Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, Jaroslav Hasˇek’s Good Soldier Svejk or Miklós Bánffy’s marvellous Transylvanian Trilogy, you will think of Austria-Hungary as a rackety empire of competing provincialisms, held together largely by antiquated codes of honour and sheer bureaucratic inefficiency.

And yet it had lasted an extraordinarily long time. Not, strictly speaking, as Austria-Hungary (that entity was formed in 1867); but there had been a multinational empire, including Austrian and Hungarian components and quite a lot else, under the rule of the Habsburg dynastysince the 16th century. For all their apparent incompetence, the Habsburgs had a huge effect on European history.

They saved Catholicism in central Europe (most of which, otherwise, would be Protestant today – including Austria itself); they fended off and then pushed back the Ottoman advance on Europe; and they also helped defeat Napoleon.

Simon Winder’s new book covers all of this in a grand sweep, from the emergence of the Habsburgs in the Middle Ages, through their centuries of rule over the Holy Roman Empire (a very different thing from the Austrian one), to their inglorious end in 1918. On one level, this is an unashamedly old-fashioned history book, filled with wars and battles, treaties and alliances, archdukes and emperors.

But readers of Winder’s previous bestseller, Germania, will know that he writes on several other levels too, most of which bear no relation to old-fashioned history as we know it. There is travelogue here, with vivid descriptions of Ukrainian towns, and Transylvanian villages. There are snatches of autobiography too, often anecdotal and whimsical, but sometimes filled with passion about his discoveries of art or music.

The main quality of this book, however, is its humour, which sets it aside from the standard histories. To say that Winder is a jokey writer would not begin to do him justice. It’s as if the author’s jocularity dial had been put, experimentally, on the maximum setting and then got stuck.

Any other writer, discussing a castle in the German-speaking part of northern Italy, might merely have noted in passing that it had different names in Italian and German; for Winder this is the opportunity for a comic riff which fills most of a paragraph. “Castel Roncolo implies a pretty turfed courtyard with maidens in gauzy outfits skipping about to tambourines and lutes with weedy youths in coloured tights looking on. Schloss Runkelstein implies a brandy-deranged old soldier-baron with a purple face and leg-iron lurching around darkened dank corridors, beating a servant to death with his crutch.” If you like this sort of thing, you will find much to enjoy in this book.

Sometimes the prose strains to make us see the past through incongruously modern eyes: in a classic painting, we are told, the late-medieval ruler Sigismund of Luxembourg has “the hardened yet vacant expression of someone who has spent too much time experimenting with mushrooms, say, or on the road with a band”. Nineteenth-century state occasions are described as “crown-and-ermine max-outs”.

Stylistically, Winder operates with a combination of breezy colloquialisms, energetic word-coinages (I did like the one about the Counter-Reformation: “the entire Catholic package was Chinooked in”), and the occasional insertion of archly recondite terms (“funambulesque”; “locustine”; “hypnopompic”). For a while I struggled to remember where I had encountered this unstable but potent mixture before; then it hit me. This is Central European history à la mode de Boris Johnson.

Winder even has a special liking for Boris’s favourite adjective: “demented”. But while the Mayor of London reserves this mostly for things he disapproves of, in Winder’s writing it expresses a kind of admiration. Other much-used terms are “crazy”, “manic”, “wacky”, and – his two front-runners – “nutty” and “loopy”. (“Bonkers”, surprisingly, has to wait until p 360, and makes only one appearance thereafter.)

There are plenty of things to which these adjectives can apply, as Winder has selected one freakish oddity after another from the store of Habsburg history. Quite a few of these are supplied by Rudolf II, the reclusive late-16th-century emperor, obsessed with alchemy and astrology, who had his portrait done in vegetables by Arcimboldoand, to Winder’s utter delight, went hunting in the outskirts of Prague with live cheetahs.

And yet, and yet… As the chapters roll past in their gales of hilarity, Winder manages at the same time to do something remarkably skilful, handling complex issues of geopolitics, national identity and cultural change with a deep and surprising thoughtfulness. His knowledgeable accounts of art and music are a further bonus.

There were times, reading this book, when I felt like someone who had been given a gallon bucket of whipped cream and ordered to eat it. But somehow, by the end of the meal, I found that I had absorbed a large quantity of hidden nutrients. I just wished that it hadn’t given me so many hiccups along the way.